In Love & Money, Anne Manne looks at the religion of work – its high priests and sacrificial lambs. As family life and motherhood feel the pressure of the market, she asks whether the chief beneficiaries are self-interested employers and child-care corporations.

This is an essay that ranges widely and entertainingly across contemporary culture: it casts an inquisitive eye over the modern marriage of Kevin Rudd and Therese Rein, and considers the time-bind and the shadow economy of care. Most fundamentally, it is an essay about pressure: the pressure to balance care for others and the world of work.

Manne argues that devaluing motherhood - still central to so many women's lives - has done feminism few favours. For women on the frontline of the work-centred society, it has made for hard choices. Eloquently and persuasively, Manne tells what happened when feminism adapted itself to the free market and argues that any true definition of equality has to take into account dependency and care for others.

Anne Manne is an Australian journalist and social philosopher who was has written widely on feminism, motherhood, childcare, family policy, fertility and related issues. She is a regular contributor to the Age and the Monthly. Her books include Quarterly Essay 29: Love & Money – The Family and the Free Market, The Life of I: the New Culture of Narcissism, and, Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children? – which was shortlisted for the 2006 Walkley non-fiction prize.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Anne Manne shows a depth and range of analysis that is rare in social-science writing today. Her arguments go behind the child-care debate, behind the work and family tension that is now in the foreground of most Australians' daily lives, to ask the really big questions.

Steve Biddulph

In Love & Money Anne Manne calls on us to imagine a radically different model of social and political life, one that centres around care rather than on gendered notions of the autonomous, unencumbered individual.